Monday Morning Roundup

Today in the roundup: We’ll be hearing a lot more locally from Jake Heggie, The Times pays a visit and Mexico turns 200.

CTA TBD

STILL CHASING THE WHALE: After years of work on his Moby-Dick opera, which the Dallas Opera debuted in the spring, you’d think Jake Heggie would be tired of Melville for a while. But the opposite seems to be the case. Heggie has been commissioned to compose a new work – tentatively called Ahab Symphony. It’s all part of his being named artist-in-residence for 2010-11 at the University of North Texas. He’ll be taking over the position from filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga. “I have been wanting to expand the journey of Moby-Dick,” Heggie tells dallasnews.com, “to broaden it and really look at some of the Ahab monologues I was not able to include in the opera. I want to create a symphonic work that is in the universe of the opera, but is new material.”

BROADWAY IS WATCHING: I’ve been wondering if The New York Times was going to take an interest in the Dallas Theater Center’s It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman. With all the talk of it possibly heading to Broadway one day, it seemed like the sort of thing The Times would take an interest in. Well, Sunday, it finally did. If you’ve been following the show’s path to the stage and the many local features and reviews over the past few months, there’s not much in the way of new information in this story. But it is worth a look for the slideshow, which gives you a pretty good idea of what the production looks like.

ON THERE OWN: While we were busy celebrating our independence from Britain this weekend, Mexico is busy for all of 2010 celebrating its independence from Spain. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Mexico’s independence, and the Dallas Museum of Art is recognizing the occasion with a pair of exhibitions: “José Guadalupe Posada: The Birth of Mexican Modernism” and “Tierra y Gente: Modern Mexican Works on Paper.” Gaile Robinson of dfw.com took in the shows and was most impressed by the work of Posada, a political cartoonist. If you’ve ever seen the art from Mexico that features those cartoonish skeletons, Posada is largely to thank.

Stephen Becker produces the shows Think and Anything You Ever Wanted to Know for KERA. As part of the Art&Seek team, Stephen produces radio and digital stories, along with the podcast "The Big Screen," with Chris Vognar, movie critic of The Dallas Morning News. View more about Stephen Becker.